WORKING WITH YOUR CHILD’S SCHOOL: “We are the first and most important people to advocate for our child.”

Parents and families are always involved in their child’s lives, even if it is in ways others cannot see, understand, or value (Ginsberg, 2012). Parents almost always want to be involved in their child’s education and have been agents of change for decades. In fact, “Parents played the primary role in bringing about litigation and legislation establishing the right to a free and appropriate public education for all children with disabilities” (Heward, 2010).

Parents know their children best and parents should be acknowledged as an expert on their children. Parents and families can offer essential and practical knowledge that can increase student success, but—as some have found out—they remain untapped resources (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992, cited in Evans, 2018).

One way to be involved in your child’s education in a meaningful way is engaging with learning at home. Rather than waiting to be invited into the school in the usual way (i.e., invitation to a Committee on Special Education or CSE meeting, or receiving a letter or phone call), work with your school to employ strategies at home or explain how dynamics at home can lead to successfully impacting student achievement and learning.

Another way to be involved and engaged is to examine emergent and critical issues concerning special education and ”to honor (your) own life experiences and empower (your)selves and other parents and families as critical collaborators” (Olivos, 2007, cited in Evans, 2018).

Remember, parents have been working with schools for a long time, and parents of children in special education have been advocating for years. They worked hard to provide their children with a good education. This work lead to the first federal law on special education, the Education of All Handicapped Children Act. This law has been updated and made stronger. Each time this law has changed, it has been done to help parents improve education for their children. The most updated version of this law is IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

But IDEA is just one law helping parents and students. Another law, ESEA, which stands for “The Elementary and Secondary Education Act,” was one of the first laws to give specific details on how to support parents. This law gives a legal definition of parents’ rights in education, and it shares what help is available. Sometimes these laws are updated to try and make them better. The most recent version of this law is ESSA, or “The Every Student Succeeds Act.”

These laws all created resources to help parent work with schools. For example, SUPAC is one of these resources. SUPAC receives funds from the New York State Education Department, or NYSED, to do its work. Stay tuned to learn more from SUPAC and from other parents of children with disabilities.

Olivos, E. M. (2007). The power of parents: A critical perspective of bicultural parent involvement in schools. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

SUPAC seeks to empower parents and families to work with their child’s school. This is one post in a new SUPAC blog series sharing advice from parents for parents to help you find ways to be involved, as well as ways to support your child’s education.

SUPAC, the Mid-State Special Education Parent Technical Assistance Center, is funded through a contract with the New York State Education Department (NYSED) Office of Special Education and seeks to empower parents to become meaningfully involved in their children’s education through school, family, and community partnerships. SUPAC is a project of the Center on Human Policy and is located on the Syracuse University campus.